Numerical simulation of physical processes for engineering design can result in very large data sets. For example, a single computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation for external aerodynamics (as illustrated in FIG. 1) can produce of the order of 10 GB of data. There is little ability in current simulation processes to make use of this data in later simulations, even if the features to be simulated subsequently are quite similar. This commonly means that large amounts of data are stored that have little scope for re-use, apart from reviewing the simulation characteristics that they originally model. Storing large amounts of data has well-known associated hardware and/or service cost implications.
When referring to the physical geometry of a product, most industrial design processes have a reasonably robust definition, either using “engineering terms” such as “wingspan”, “number of wheels”, “bar thickness”, etc, or with a computer-aided design (CAD) definition involving mathematical specification of surfaces, intersections, topologies, etc. Many of these products interact with fluids (such as aircraft, boats, cars, computer chips, artificial hearts, etc). Although the fluid interaction is very important and it is possible to identify characteristics of the fluid flow, it is very difficult to compare “like flows” other than in fairly general terms.
Field specialists will often analyse a flow field in terms of apparent features, such as “stagnation points”, “vortices”, “boundary layer characteristics”, “shock waves”, etc, which are valid descriptors, but have their origins in physical experimentation and are intuitive in the sense that they exist in three dimensions. Current CFD simulation applications do not deal with or present data in these user-friendly terms, i.e. raw data is presented to an engineer who then uses that to identify and quantify the features of interest. Although it is possible to post-process a CFD file to obtain data that is more meaningful to an engineer, there is currently no system that automatically processes it in such a way so as to directly relate it to other data that has been produced in a similar manner.